Experimenting with Fog in Coastal Peru: The Infrastructural as Comparative Effect

In Peru, a steady inflow of coastal fog has recently been re-apprehended as a potential water source. This presentation draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Limeñan conservationists who tapped into this airborne extension of the ocean for use in fog oasis ecosystem reforestation. I show how experimental engagements with fog had reconfigured conservationists’ understanding about the connections between the atmosphere, vegetation, and the underground, thereby bringing into view a hitherto imperceptible environmental infrastructure of groundwater production. The infrastructural potentials of the landscape were in turn foregrounded by the conservationists through comparisons with other geographies well-known for their capacity to produce water. Against this backdrop, I will suggest an understanding of the infrastructural as a comparative effect situated between an imagined foreground and background. As environmental calamities complicate the infrastructure-environment nexus, it is no longer clear what infrastructures consist of, nor what they can do. In this context, an understanding of environmental infrastructures as comparative effects might be useful for describing and speculatively amplifying potentially more sustainable infrastructural alternatives. 

Speaker: Chakad Ojani. Chakad received a PhD in social anthropology at the University of Manchester in 2021. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher within the project, "Space technologies, resources and "multi-planetary communities: Space exploration and the imaginaries of living in a climate changing world" at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.